grrgyle

Welcome to the 17th writing club update!

Before launching into the writing club, I have a little preview of something @JacobCoffinWrites has spearheaded: a wiki resource for solarpunk writers who are looking for realistic visions of the hopeful world to be. You might have noticed a new link to the 🎉 this brand new writing wiki 🎉 in our community sidebar. Anyway, I'll let the intro speak for itself here:

Writing aspirational fiction is hard. If you're trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting and that requires so much knowledge to do well. Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permaculture practices, modern airship design and operation, phytoremediation, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there's both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you're writing in a dystopian setting, and the differences are pretty clear.

It's a lot for any one writer to try and take on. Luckily we don't have to work alone. Any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

(On that final note, we're still trying to figure out a way to let people contribute to this wiki.)

But back to the seventeenth writing club, in the sage words of chapter 17: Communicating with a PostScript Printer (page 571) of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by Richard Stevens, /* don't want to write() to block */ -- but isn't that just the thing? Sometimes you have to write() in order to get through the block.

Speakering of writing(), here are our writer[]:

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride
• @shamousk
• @solbear

As is it ever has been and will eternally be, blessed randos should feel totally free to drop in with their updates, or comments on the goings ons of others. This little writing club thrives on our interactions, so go interact!

Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:

Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they're more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.

Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. [...]

This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term "generative art" would take on a very different insinuation. I've certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.

Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)

Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it's starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.

Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride
• @solbear

I think I'll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don't seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.

As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.

I keep forgetting how many 'e' there are in regular English, and I'm doing ,,,,,,,. through all of them to get to the character I was after.

Welcome to the 15th (fifteenth) writing club update. Opening Manu Saadia's Trekonomics to page 15 ("Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan"), we find this fiction related snippet:

When the movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] was over, I really, really did not want to leave the bridge of the Enterprise. I had to make that experience last. I still remember that very precise feeling, equal parts wonderment, recognition, and melancholy: this was the place I had been looking for, this was where I wanted to live, this was where I belonged. I had found my promised land. Pity it was all fiction and make-believe.

A pity indeed that the post-scarcity almost-utopia of Star Trek's Federation is only make-believe. But then isn't a story an almost-world, waiting to be brought forward by the midwives of action. Maybe casting writers and artists as parents is overstating our importance a little bit... it's nice to think about, though.

But what I can't overstate is how great our writers are:

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride
• @solbear

If your name is not on this list and you think it should be, or vice-versa, just let me know and I'll fix it right away. Also, is this list serving anyone? How do we feel about it? Is it motivational, useful, etc? DM or comment me your thoughts. I could go either way.

As always, guests are welcome to participate in this thread as much or as little as they like. A special hello to our honoured lurkers 👋️ your eyeballs are my drug of choice.

White dress frosted with lace weeping threads
hem worn from wandering
white marble halls cold as snow
sunsets blood-red, rose-red
& nights raven-black.

I tried growing my hair long
as towers, long as history
long as these empty, empty, halls.

Oils & braiding & fancy shampoos
never worked, left my hair brittle
& only just past my shoulders
years and years on.

I stopped trying to fit that fairy tale.

I thought I'd grow apples & roses
coat fields in flowers & fruit
that I'd bake into pies and press into cider
to warm me each winter next.

But I go tired of farming
my hands chapped & back aching
& when the first grey snuck into my dark brown
— never black, never luscious — hair
I put my seeds away.

One winter I thought I'd sleep
the seasons away, pad my face with mud masks
& stop each wrinkle before it formed
I was too late, of course, the wrinkles began
in my twenties, and continue spreading
like frost.

I don't sleep well at the best f times
rising to wander in moonlight
& snack in the kitchen when the mice
are sleep.

So no — I decided that the story wasn't for me.

I never learned to swim, so the pond
stays isolated. Its merfolk & frogs
unkissed, undanced. Under the willows:
only wind.

I thought finally about reading —
how else can I travel without cramming my feet
into too-tight hoes
meant only for parties?

I filled my pockets with snack & retired to the library
only to find that most of the books
are quite boring, not for me
& the cord for the kindle is terribly shorts
& the chairs not as comfortable as they looked
from afar

So no. I am not fair
or smart
or lovesick
or distressed
or waiting for someone
to tell me who I'll be.

I know:
I dread gardening
I loathe cleaning
I hate socializing.

I know:
I can't swim
can't cook
can't sleep well at all.

I know there are some books I love
but most I don't.
Some night I am light
but most I am heavy.

I know all these things about myself
& in finding out each
I lived.

I tried it all, & I've decided
I like myself best. I like wandering in the night
& letting my tea grow cold.
I like dozing on the couch
& dyeing my hair.
I like myself — a lot —
& I don't mind if I change
& grow old.

Because I know that each year I try
something I likely won't like at all
I'm knowing myself more.

& I'm loving that self
better than all the ones I knew
before.

Was pretty chuffed to come across this one as my local bibliothèque is pretty overwhelmed with reservations.

Just got this as a gift and it's legit. Murderbot is so popular now I have to wait over a month for the library to have a copy available.

No more! Now I'm big dog owner of digital books, look at me. Look at me.

Punchy little article that touches binds together a few frustrations into a clear set of well articulated complaints.

EDIT: meant to post this elsewhere since it's not really about the smol web, so much as what wrong with much of the rest of the web, but if you invert the complaints in the article you basically find everything that is lovable about our lovely indie spaces. :)

As the author says in this article, it's not their original idea, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it.

It basically boils down to play a game from your backlog for a bit, and whether you liked it or not, or kept playing it or bounced right off, you now have permission to remove it from your backlog. It sounds very freeing.

I take perhaps a little too much pride in having a very small catalogue of unplayed games (not because I play games a lot, but because I am dreadfully cheap and hardly ever buy anything lol), but even an old miser like me could probably benefit from a little tidying.

Hi folks, and welcome to writing club update number 14 (fourteen!). Opening up to page 14 of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles we find this paradoxically stark and effusive description of a coming storm. Or perhaps all coming storms:

It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors. And the change pressed at your ears and you were suspended in the waiting time of the coming storm.

[...]

And then the storm. The electric illumination, the engulfments of dark wash and sounding black fell down, shutting in, forever.

Being as much of my bioregion is currently in the middle of a month-long drought, we could do with a "dark wash" right now. I hope you've had a decent amount of rain wherever you are, and if you're also in a drought, I wish for both of us a big beautiful storm soon!

Speaking of welcome deluges, here are our wonderful writers:

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @ManualOverride

Hopefully your writing has felt more like a deluge than a drought, but even the latter can be constructive in its own way. This also goes to any visitors not on this list (welcome!): please feel welcome to reply and comment with your own thoughts and projects!

Hello hello, and welcome to our now 13th (XIIIth) writing club update. My dictionary explains that the meaning of "thirteen" is:

One more than twelve.

Truly words to live by. Shuffling around my books for a more inspirational bit of numerology, I find the chapter in Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" book, wherein we're introduced to the outsider "Keda" who is to be a wet-nurse for the titular prince of Gormenghast. I'm not sure how that relates to what we're doing here, but it's a pretty weird, and cool, book.

Speaking of weird and cool...!

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @ManualOverride

As always, all are extremely welcome to participate in the writing club, regardless of whether they're in the list above.

Not actually ads as we, the modern netizens of the internet of 2005+20 know them, but fun little sort of buttons or blinkies used to cross-promote other places on the smol web.

I've seen a few of these around. But most recently I stumbled onto navlink ads and it reminded me of the phenomenon. I know there are others out there, I just can't remember where to find them.

Anyway, I like them. It's like using the tools of advertisers to add a little irreverent fun to our indie spaces.